Quotes of the Day:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
“As I see it, only God can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power. Thus there is no authority on earth so inherently worthy of respect, or invested with a right so sacred, that I would want to let it act without oversight or rule without impediment (p. 290).”
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
“It can be difficult to speak truth to power. Circumstances, however, have made doing so increasingly necessary.”
- Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
1. North Korea’s Nuclear Family: How the Kims Got the Bomb and Why They Won’t Give It Up
2. Korea airlifts 391 Afghans to Incheon
3. ‘Moral responsibility’: South Korea is airlifting hundreds of Afghans out of Kabul
4. US Special Envoy for North Korea Visits South Korea
5. Korea takes Afghan refugees in show of US loyalty
6. Four reasons for an ‘end of armistice’ declaration
7. Seoul Ranked 25th Safest City in the World
8. Three Chinese sailors gunned down after landing on North Pyongan Province island
9. North Korea's foreign ministry defends Cuba's capture of American, boat seizure as 'legitimate measure'
10. North Korean students mobilized to help out with flood relief during vacation
11. Can food kindness win over North Korea?
12. The Cycle Begins Anew In North Korea – OpEd
13. Moon names new secretary for New Southern and Northern policies
14. Fat-Shaming, North Korea Style
15. California celebrates ‘Kimchi Day,’ declaring S. Korea as origin
16. Biden should end North Korea travel ban, humanitarian and advocacy groups say
1. North Korea’s Nuclear Family: How the Kims Got the Bomb and Why They Won’t Give It Up
A very good run down to show us how we got to where we are (or where north Korea is!)
Information is key. It is an existential threat to the regime. Human rights is a moral imperative and national security issue.
And as I have written many times, this is the bottomline: The only way we are going to see an end to the nuclear program and threats as well as the human rights abuses and crimes against humanity being committed against the Korean people living in the north by the mafia-like crime family cult known as the Kim family regime is through achievement of unification and the establishment of a United Republic of Korea that is secure and stable, non-nuclear, economically vibrant, and unified under a liberal constitutional form of government based on individual liberty, rule of law, and human rights as determined by the Korean people. In short, a United Republic of Korea (UROK).
Excerpts:
With these containment measures in place, Washington should focus on small steps to loosen the regime’s grip on the North Korean people. News from the outside world already seeps into the North across its porous border with China. Black and gray markets inside the country have made it easier to distribute banned technologies and media. As a result, more North Koreans than ever can see the gap between the state’s myths and the cruel reality. To a regime built on lies, that burgeoning awareness poses a threat—one that Washington can work to amplify with its own clandestine information operations.
The Biden administration should also maintain a global focus on the North’s appalling record of abusing its own population. The regime has devoted its scarce resources to building nuclear weapons rather than feeding its own people or providing them with basic services. Washington should highlight this link and push for renewed UN human rights investigations and resolutions on the matter.
This strategy—combining information operations and a human rights campaign—would echo the Western policies that once contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kim is entering his second decade in power, but with swirling rumors about his health and a persistently dire economic outlook, no one knows how stable his rule really is. Whatever the regime’s immediate future, its long-term prospects are bleak unless it carries out genuine economic reforms, but reforms might engender political instability of their own. Against that background, an information and human rights campaign would not yield any quick results on the nuclear front, but it might plant the seeds of a more enduring shift. Only when North Korea becomes more accountable and responsive to its own people will there be any chance for meaningful progress toward denuclearization. A transformed regime under a future leader might perceive less of a need to develop nuclear deterrent capabilities and pose less of a threat to its own people or its neighbors.
Absent such a regime change or transformation—highly unlikely but not impossible—the only other durable solution to the nuclear crisis is the country’s reunification under the democratically elected, pro-Western government in Seoul. Even if a unified, democratic Korea decided to keep a nuclear arsenal, it would still not pose the kind of threat that the world currently faces from the tyrannical regime in Pyongyang. Ultimately, the North Korean nuclear crisis is a reflection of North Korea’s government. Until that regime either dramatically reforms itself or collapses, the nuclear threat will remain.
North Korea’s Nuclear Family
How the Kims Got the Bomb and Why They Won’t Give It Up
When the Biden administration, following a months-long review, announced its North Korea policy this past April—“diplomacy, as well as stern deterrence”—the news barely registered. The question of how to deal with the nuclear-armed pariah state, a matter never resolved but never fully escalating into an existential threat, has dogged a long succession of U.S. administrations. The prevailing sense today, amid a pandemic and heightened great-power tension, seems to be that Washington has bigger fish to fry and more urgent crises to focus on.
That impression is dangerously misguided. Years of inconsistent, and at times counterproductive, U.S. efforts to contain the North Korean nuclear threat have only let it fester, such that U.S. President Joe Biden now faces a far more capable adversary in Pyongyang than his predecessors ever did. In the 15 years since North Korea’s first-ever nuclear test, the country has amassed up to 60 nuclear warheads and enough fissile material to build at least six additional bombs every year. More alarming still, these weapons can now most likely reach the continental United States. North Korea already fields long-range missiles capable of hitting the East Coast. It is impossible to know for certain whether it has figured out how to place a nuclear warhead on top of those missiles, but the available evidence suggests that it has. North Korea is likely moving on to the next step: placing multiple warheads on a single missile, which would allow it to frustrate U.S. missile defenses. What was once a pure hypothetical—a North Korean nuclear strike on the American mainland—is fast becoming a real possibility.
North Korea is still unlikely to launch a nuclear attack against the United States, knowing it would suffer devastating retaliation. But an emboldened North Korean regime with growing nuclear capabilities could resort to increasingly reckless behavior, such as conventional strikes, terrorist plots, or cyberattacks. Japan and South Korea, in turn, could lose confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella and feel compelled to field their own nuclear weapons, setting off a destabilizing nuclear arms race across the region. Moreover, if North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, believes that his nuclear and missile programs provide some degree of protection for his misbehavior, his cash-strapped regime could be tempted to sell nuclear weapons, materials, or expertise to other states and nonstate actors. (In the past, North Korea helped build a nuclear reactor in Syria and sold missiles to Iran, Myanmar, and other countries.) In short, a nuclear-armed North Korea is a security nightmare for Washington even if the regime never uses its arsenal, and the years ahead could prove a turning point for the region.
North Korea’s nuclear program has been a thorn in the side of five American presidents, sometimes approaching crisis levels, sometimes receding to secondary importance. But over the past few years, as Pyongyang’s warheads have come into striking distance of the American heartland, the threat has become a qualitatively different one. If the United States ever had an opportunity to turn back the clock on North Korea’s nuclear program—and it is far from clear that it ever did—that moment has passed. That this change was so long in the making has inured analysts and policymakers to its gravity. But before long, a crisis is all but certain to drive home how much more difficult and dangerous the North Korean nuclear challenge has become. This realization requires a new approach: one that considers the lessons of Pyongyang’s successful quest, in defiance of broad international opposition and consistent U.S. efforts, to become a nuclear power—and one that recognizes how much more constrained U.S. options in North Korea have become.
how the north won out
Although poor and isolated, North Korea has pursued nuclear weapons relentlessly in the face of growing international condemnation. The state’s nuclear aspirations date back to the 1950s, when North Korean scientists first gained basic nuclear expertise with Soviet assistance. Over the course of the following decades, the regime continued accumulating sensitive nuclear technologies, and in the 1980s, it built its first nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. In 1985, North Korea signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but it did so under Soviet pressure, not out of genuine conviction. Soon thereafter, it began covertly reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Years of further research and enrichment culminated in the country’s first nuclear test in October 2006. Five more tests have followed.
Only a handful of states have ever ended their nuclear programs or given up their nuclear weapons voluntarily, and it often took some form of regime change for them to do so. North Korea is no different: Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons are a military asset, an insurance policy, and a vast source of prestige all in one. The Kim family, which has ruled the country without interruption since 1948, does not want to go the way of Saddam Hussein of Iraq or Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya—tyrants who gave up their weapons of mass destruction programs only to be overthrown and killed. Leaders in Pyongyang are convinced that nobody, not even a superpower such as the United States, would dare to attack or even seriously undermine a state armed with the ultimate weapon. At home, the nuclear weapons confer a degree of legitimacy on the regime: a point of national pride, they justify the deprivations that ordinary citizens suffer to support the state and its military. Abroad, they raise the country’s diplomatic profile, making up for its deficits in political, economic, and soft power. The bomb also raises the potential cost to the United States of defending its ally South Korea in a war and thus serves Pyongyang’s goal of driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington. The regime is, and has always been, unlikely to give up that trump card, no matter what political or economic concessions it is offered in return. To truly steer Pyongyang off its current course would have required stepping in before it ever produced its first warhead—and even then, success would have come at too high of a cost.
Consider the events of 1994, perhaps the best opportunity the United States ever had to permanently undo the North’s nuclear progress. At the time, Pyongyang’s enrichment efforts were well underway, and the regime was preparing to remove several nuclear fuel rods from its research reactor in Yongbyon. Inside the rods, experts suspected, was enough weapons-grade plutonium to build half a dozen nuclear bombs. Despite intense pressure, Pyongyang refused to grant international inspectors access to the site.
Years of inconsistent U.S. efforts to contain the North Korean nuclear threat have only let it fester.
Washington saw the danger—a hostile state might be on the verge of crossing “the nuclear finish line,” as Ashton Carter, then U.S. assistant secretary of defense, put it—and seriously contemplated military action. In one plan that reached U.S. President Bill Clinton’s desk, American cruise missiles and F-117 stealth fighters would carry out a precision strike on Yongbyon, burying the fuel rods in a mountain of rubble and thus preventing North Korea from weaponizing its fissile material. But as Clinton was weighing his options, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter traveled to Pyongyang and, on his own initiative, negotiated a deal: North Korea would freeze its nuclear weapons program in exchange for oil and assistance for its civilian nuclear sector. Clinton assented, and later that year, he signed an agreement with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Under the deal, known as the Agreed Framework, the North pledged to halt its plutonium-producing reactors in Yongbyon. In return, an American-led consortium would deliver about ten years’ worth of heavy oil to North Korea and build two civilian light-water nuclear reactors in the country, among other concessions. A potential war had been averted.
Knowing how history unfolded (spoiler alert: North Korea did not stop its nuclear program), one wonders if Clinton was right not to strike when he had the chance. But the picture is muddled and full of questionable counterfactuals. A single airstrike, or even a series of strikes, would have only slowed down Pyongyang’s nuclear progress, not reversed it. A full-scale war, on the other hand, would almost certainly have meant North Korea’s defeat at the hands of the United States and South Korea, likely followed by regime change and a guaranteed end to the North’s nuclear program. But the cost would have been prohibitive. Pyongyang’s artillery, although inferior to U.S. and South Korean firepower, was still formidable. North Korean shelling could have led to 250,000 casualties in Seoul alone, and some estimates put the total number of possible deaths at one million—a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.
Clinton’s and Carter’s diplomacy, however, could not rein in the North Koreans. Although Pyongyang froze its plutonium capabilities after the 1994 deal, it secretly continued working with A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, to enrich uranium instead. When a U.S. envoy confronted North Korean officials about their cheating in October 2002, they were unrepentant. Within a few months, North Korea expelled international inspectors and withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, triggering renewed tensions.
Standing guard near Pyongyang, North Korea, April 2012
Bobby Yip / Reuters
For defenders of the Agreed Framework, the blame for its breakdown lay partly with U.S. President George W. Bush. Earlier in 2002, Bush had lumped North Korea together with Iran and Iraq as part of what he called “an axis of evil”—bellicose rhetoric that, coming on the heels of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, was said to have spooked Pyongyang and contributed to its decision to withdraw from the agreement. Meanwhile, the construction of the promised light-water reactors was behind schedule, and the United States had never fully normalized relations with North Korea, as laid out in the Agreed Framework. But what was the Bush administration supposed to do once it had evidence of North Korean cheating? Offering more concessions to coax the regime back into compliance, as some critics later suggested, would have simply rewarded Pyongyang for its transgressions and incentivized more cheating down the line. In truth, the failure of the agreement was of North Korea’s own making.
To imagine what paltry results more engagement in 2002 would have brought, consider South Korea’s separate efforts to sway its neighbor. Under the so-called Sunshine Policy, the South Korean government sent the North approximately $8 billion in economic assistance from 1998 to 2008 in the hope of improving bilateral relations. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung even won a Nobel Peace Prize for a historic meeting with Kim Jong Il—a summit, it was later divulged, made possible through the payment of $500 million in cash to the reclusive dictator. Yet all these inducements did little to shift the North’s course. On the contrary, after North Korea withdrew from the Agreed Framework in 2002, it accelerated its nuclear program.
The United States, for its part, seemed stuck in an exasperating cycle of sanctions and pressure campaigns followed by overtures and agreements that invariably fell apart. Among other steps, the Bush administration worked to cut off North Korea’s access to hard currency—obtained mostly through drug smuggling, counterfeiting, and money laundering—and thus target the money flows that funded the extravagant lifestyles of North Korean elites. As the centerpiece of this new initiative, Washington imposed sanctions in 2005 on the Macao-based Banco Delta Asia, where North Korea kept $25 million in various accounts, triggering heightened scrutiny by other banks around the world. The squeeze worked as intended: North Korean officials called the sanctions “intolerable.” According to The Wall Street Journal, one official, after one too many drinks, told his American counterparts that they had “finally found a way to hurt us.”
Despite the encouraging feedback, the sanctions remained short lived. When Pyongyang tested its first nuclear weapon the following year, Bush decided to unfreeze the accounts at Banco Delta Asia in an effort to jump-start talks. Protracted negotiations eventually produced a joint statement in which North Korea pledged to disable all its nuclear facilities and stop the export of nuclear material and technology; in return, Washington promised to remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and resume oil shipments and food aid. But Pyongyang refused to agree to robust verification meas-ures, dooming the accord just as Bush left office. Despite this failure, Washington did not reimpose sanctions on Banco Delta Asia or put North Korea back on the terrorism list until almost a decade later, thus in effect rewarding Pyongyang for its saber rattling.
Falling in love with rocket man
The same hopeless dynamic characterized the Obama years, which North Korea rang in with a second nuclear test in May 2009. After several years of impasse, U.S. President Barack Obama briefly reached an agreement with North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong Un, in 2012. (Kim had taken power after his father’s death a year earlier.) This time, the United States would provide food aid in exchange for a moratorium on ballistic missile tests and any nuclear activities. Shortly after the agreement was rolled out, however, North Korea launched a satellite into orbit using the same technology that would be used to fire a long-range missile. Another deal thus fell apart. To top things off, Pyongyang declared that its nuclear weapons were not a bargaining chip and would not be relinquished even for “billions of dollars.”
The episode put an end to the Obama administration’s hopes for a deal. Washington reverted to a policy of “strategic patience,” which was designed, as Jeffrey Bader, a National Security Council staffer, put it, to “break the cycle of provocation, extortion, and reward.” This meant maintaining sanctions without launching any major diplomatic initiatives. In kicking the can down the road, Obama managed to peeve both liberal and conservative Korea watchers: liberal “engagers” saw the policy as forgoing diplomacy in the face of a worsening nuclear threat, whereas hard-liners complained that Washington was failing to ratchet up the pressure.
The waiting game came to a sudden stop when U.S. President Donald Trump took office in 2017. Casting aside “strategic patience” in favor of “maximum pressure,” Trump doubled down on sanctions and authorized the U.S. Treasury Department to blacklist any foreign business or individual that facilitated trade with North Korea. His administration also convinced the UN Security Council to adopt a new set of tough sanctions aimed at cutting off nearly all of Pyongyang’s sources of hard currency. Meanwhile, a series of leaks suggested that the administration was considering launching a preemptive, “bloody nose” military strike on North Korean nuclear sites. All of this was accompanied by Trump’s threats to rain “fire and fury” down on “Rocket Man”—his belittling nickname for the North Korean leader.
Kim responded with bluster of his own, but he also extended an unexpected olive branch. In his 2018 New Year’s Day address, he declared that his country’s nuclear program was “complete” and offered to hold conditional talks with South Korea. Through South Korean envoys, he also proposed a summit with the U.S. president. Trump, sensing an opportunity to play dealmaker, accepted the offer the moment he heard of it. In an instant, maximum pressure was transformed into maximum engagement.
An emboldened North Korean regime with growing nuclear capabilities could resort to increasingly reckless behavior.
Trump reveled in the three meetings he had with Kim over the course of 2018 and 2019, at one point declaring that he and Kim had “fallen in love.” But the lovefest failed to produce any tangible results. At their first summit, Trump brought Kim a bizarre, make-believe movie trailer showcasing the prosperity that North Korea could enjoy if it gave up its nuclear weapons. It eluded Trump entirely that Kim himself already had all the luxury goods he could ever hope for and that he was not going to give up the security that nuclear weapons afforded his regime. Trump walked away with a vague commitment for both sides to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Subsequent attempts to put meat on this bare-bones agreement went nowhere.
That Trump managed to leave office without inviting some sort of catastrophe on the North Korean front may count as a success in and of itself. But it is worth noting just how well his initial strategy of pressuring and isolating the rogue regime seemed to be working. By late 2017, about 90 percent of North Korean exports were illegal under international law. On top of far-reaching U.S. sanctions, nine major Security Council resolutions had banned the country’s most lucrative exports—coal, iron ore, seafood, and textiles, among others—which had been netting the regime $3 billion a year. UN resolutions are effective only if enforced, and China, to everyone’s surprise, was finally doing its part after years of dragging its feet. Meanwhile, over 20 countries had restricted North Korea’s foreign diplomatic presence, which Pyongyang was known to use to evade sanctions.
It is unlikely that maximum pressure would have forced North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons had it been sustained for longer. Still, it stood a better chance than Trump’s summitry of securing meaningful limits on Pyongyang’s nuclear activities. Recall that Iran agreed to roll back—but not eliminate—its nuclear program in 2015 only after three years of maximum pressure from Washington. North Korea, too, would have had a greater incentive to negotiate in good faith and move away from maximalist demands if it had suffered longer-lasting economic pressure. Unfortunately, following Trump’s premature pivot to dealmaking, the air started to leak out of the sanctions campaign. China and Russia both eased up on their sanctions enforcement. Today, even South Korea is unlikely to support a return to the no-holds-barred approach of 2017; South Korean President Moon Jae-in, currently in his last six months in office, is eager to jump-start dialogue with the North and move ahead with inter-Korean projects that have stalled in recent years.
false hopes
What emerges, in retrospect, is a dispiriting picture. Washington appears to have exhausted its peaceful options to no avail. The one policy that could have achieved denuclearization—invading North Korea and toppling its regime—was fraught with uncertainty and would have exacted an unacceptable human toll. What little leeway Washington did have to slow the North Koreans’ progress and thus buy more time for a permanent solution it squandered through its endless zigzagging—from diplomacy to “strategic patience” to “fire and fury” and back to diplomacy, without ever giving any one approach a fair chance to succeed.
Some might argue that it was U.S. hostility that compelled North Korea to seek the bomb in the first place—that things would have turned out differently had the United States normalized relations, lifted sanctions, concluded a peace treaty, and pulled its troops out of South Korea. This confuses cause and effect. American soldiers were sent to South Korea following the North Korean invasion of 1950, and they stayed because the North Korean threat never went away. (As recently as 2010, North Korea torpedoed and sank a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 seamen.) And it’s not as if a U.S. withdrawal would dispel North Korea’s pervasive sense of insecurity. The Kim dynasty, a Stalinist dictatorship built on deception and oppression, is ultimately threatened by its own lack of legitimacy. It can never feel safe as long as a freer, more prosperous rival Korean state exists next door. The nukes are as much about the regime’s own desperation as they are about deterring U.S. military action.
Kim in Pyongyang, June 2021
Korean Central News Agency / Reuters
It is true, however, that U.S. policymakers have often failed to understand the North Korean regime. Those in the engagement camp—including Trump, once he was meeting with Kim—have falsely convinced themselves that North Korean leaders share their hopes for peace and could be enticed away from nuclear weapons with offers of increased aid and economic incentives. Some hard-liners, for their part, have been led astray in thinking that there was a military option, either in 1994 or more recently, that could have surgically neutralized the North Korean nuclear program without triggering a catastrophic war. Unfortunately, there has never been an easy way out.
If there is a government that could have made a real difference, it is not Washington but Beijing. China is North Korea’s largest trading partner by far and a major source of energy supplies. It can bring North Korea to its knees simply by stopping the flow of oil—as it did for a few months in 2013 and again in 2014, when it was infuriated by yet another nuclear test and by the execution of Jang Song Thaek, Kim’s uncle and Beijing’s main interlocutor in Pyongyang. But the pressure was not sustained. China, albeit no fan of the North Korean nuclear program, is far more afraid that too much pressure might cause the regime in Pyongyang to collapse, sending refugees flooding into China and possibly bringing U.S. troops and their South Korean allies right up to its doorstep. And with U.S.-Chinese relations at a low point, Beijing has little reason to give Washington a helping hand.
a new threat
In dealing with Pyongyang, Biden is the latest American leader to confront a set of unappealing options, but the potential consequences of failure, already severe to begin with, have worsened dramatically. Unlike past presidents, Biden now faces a determined adversary with a robust nuclear deterrent that includes the ability to hit the continental United States with nuclear missiles. He has not had to acknowledge as much, as Kim—likely distracted by the fallout of the pandemic—has so far forgone the missile and nuclear tests that have usually greeted new U.S. presidents. But the odds are that Kim will eventually resume his tried-and-true strategy of provocations followed by insincere peace overtures. Before long, things will inevitably come to a head.
How will Biden respond to the next crisis? Come what may, a preemptive military strike should remain off-limits. If that option was deemed too risky and costly to pursue in 1994, it is all the more so today. Many of the North’s nuclear warheads and missiles are believed to be hidden in covert facilities and buried in impenetrable bunkers; some can be moved around with ease. Airstrikes are unlikely to eliminate these capabilities in one fell swoop, meaning that Kim could retaliate with a nuclear strike.
Diplomacy is a better option, but it is no more likely to bring about denuclearization. At most, Pyongyang might agree to an interim nuclear freeze deal that limits its nuclear weapons capabilities for a given period. But history suggests that negotiations will ultimately fail over the issue of verification. Instead of making concessions and getting nothing in return, Biden must come to terms with two fundamental facts. First, North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons as long as its totalitarian regime remains in charge. Second, U.S.-led regime change, at least in the short term, is not an option. Biden’s best bet is to contain the threat and then work to gradually weaken the regime’s hold on power from the bottom up.
Start with sanctions. It will be hard, perhaps impossible, to return to the maximum-pressure policy of 2017 as long as China does not prioritize sanctions enforcement. But renewed North Korean provocations, such as a nuclear or a long-range missile test, could bring Beijing back onboard. In the meantime, Washington can still revive its efforts to target the North’s illicit revenue streams and foreign bank accounts. It could also impose secondary sanctions on Chinese companies doing business with North Korea, provided that this doesn’t disrupt its wider China strategy.
In dealing with Pyongyang, Biden is the latest American leader to confront a set of unappealing options.
At the same time, the United States should continue its efforts to deter North Korea from acts of aggression against its neighbors. Doing so will require increasing cooperation with its allies Japan and South Korea, which in turn need to be encouraged to work more closely with each other. Together, the three allies could integrate their missile defenses, streamline their intelligence sharing, and enhance their antisubmarine warfare, among other steps.
Counterproliferation measures will be essential, too. North Korea has been known to share ballistic missile technology with Iran and Syria, in addition to other countries. The more nuclear weapons and missiles the regime produces, the greater the risk that it will share its knowledge with more states, or even nonstate actors, in return for what it needs the most—hard currency. Washington will need to build a coalition of states to conduct extensive surveillance on the ground, at sea, and in the air to detect any such proliferation activities, and Biden must make clear that any infractions will carry severe consequences.
With these containment measures in place, Washington should focus on small steps to loosen the regime’s grip on the North Korean people. News from the outside world already seeps into the North across its porous border with China. Black and gray markets inside the country have made it easier to distribute banned technologies and media. As a result, more North Koreans than ever can see the gap between the state’s myths and the cruel reality. To a regime built on lies, that burgeoning awareness poses a threat—one that Washington can work to amplify with its own clandestine information operations.
The Biden administration should also maintain a global focus on the North’s appalling record of abusing its own population. The regime has devoted its scarce resources to building nuclear weapons rather than feeding its own people or providing them with basic services. Washington should highlight this link and push for renewed UN human rights investigations and resolutions on the matter.
This strategy—combining information operations and a human rights campaign—would echo the Western policies that once contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kim is entering his second decade in power, but with swirling rumors about his health and a persistently dire economic outlook, no one knows how stable his rule really is. Whatever the regime’s immediate future, its long-term prospects are bleak unless it carries out genuine economic reforms, but reforms might engender political instability of their own. Against that background, an information and human rights campaign would not yield any quick results on the nuclear front, but it might plant the seeds of a more enduring shift. Only when North Korea becomes more accountable and responsive to its own people will there be any chance for meaningful progress toward denuclearization. A transformed regime under a future leader might perceive less of a need to develop nuclear deterrent capabilities and pose less of a threat to its own people or its neighbors.
Absent such a regime change or transformation—highly unlikely but not impossible—the only other durable solution to the nuclear crisis is the country’s reunification under the democratically elected, pro-Western government in Seoul. Even if a unified, democratic Korea decided to keep a nuclear arsenal, it would still not pose the kind of threat that the world currently faces from the tyrannical regime in Pyongyang. Ultimately, the North Korean nuclear crisis is a reflection of North Korea’s government. Until that regime either dramatically reforms itself or collapses, the nuclear threat will remain.
2. Korea airlifts 391 Afghans to Incheon
Excerpts:
Choi stressed that the Afghan evacuees "are not refugees, but come to Korea as people of special merit."
He added, "Our government decided to welcome them to our country taking into consideration our moral responsibility amid a grave situation facing colleagues who have worked with us, our responsibility as a member of the international community and our global status as a leading nation upholding human rights, as well as the fact that other countries in a similar situation have also been transporting the Afghans."
The final number of evacuees was fewer than the 427 Afghans that had signed up to fly to Korea. A Foreign Ministry official confirmed Wednesday that 36 people ultimately chose to stay in Afghanistan or evacuate to another country.
Korea airlifts 391 Afghans to Incheon
Afghans who have worked for the Korean government and their family members wait in line to board a South Korean Air Force transport plane at the Kabul airport Tuesday, local time. Some 390 evacuees are set to arrive at Incheon International Airport Thursday. [FOREIGN MINISTRY]
Three Korean military planes are airlifting some 390 Afghans out of the war-torn country, Seoul's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday, to come to Korea.
Second Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-moon said in a briefing Wednesday that these Afghans, who worked for Seoul's embassy or on Korean government humanitarian aid projects over the years, will arrive at Incheon International Airport Thursday.
The Korean Air Force aircraft were flown to Pakistan and Afghanistan Monday to bring back Afghans who supported Korean government activities in Afghanistan and their relatives, Seoul's Foreign Ministry initially confirmed Tuesday evening.
The Foreign Ministry said Wednesday morning there were around 380 Afghans bound for Korea, and later updated the figure to 391 evacuees from 76 households. This includes around 100 children, of which three are babies born this month.
This is the first time the Korean government has decided to accept foreigners from a conflict zone on a large scale and relocate them to Korea for humanitarian reasons.
The ministry said that as the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, many people appealed to the Korean embassy for assistance to fly to Korea, raising concerns over their personal safety and possible retaliations from the Taliban against U.S. allies.
The evacuees include medical professionals, IT experts, interpreters and other local staff who have worked for many years at the Korean Embassy in Afghanistan, the Korea International Cooperation Agency (Koica), the now shuttered Korean Hospital in Bagram, the Korean Vocational Training Center and a provincial reconstruction team in Charikar. Their spouses, children and parents are included on the list.
The Korean government initially considered transporting the Afghan evacuees on foreign chartered planes, but decided to deploy military transport planes after the situation in Kabul deteriorated.
In turn, the government set up a task force and planned the evacuation of the Afghans to Korea as fast as they could, dubbing it "Operation Miracle."
A KC-330 multi-role aerial tanker and two Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules military transport aircraft arrived in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad Monday. The KC-330 tanker remained on standby in Islamabad, while the C-130Js began transporting the Afghans out of Kabul to Islamabad Tuesday. They were set to depart for Incheon airport Wednesday.
The flight from Islamabad to Incheon by a KC-330 multirole aerial tanker takes around 11 hours, while C-130J aircraft take around 17 hours because they need to be refueled.
Around 60 to 70 personnel, including military and medical staff, were deployed for the evacuation operation, said a Seoul Defense Ministry official. Noting that over a fourth of the evacuees are children under five, the aircraft were equipped with baby formula, bottles and other necessities for toddlers.
The Korean embassy was temporarily closed on Aug. 15 after Taliban forces swept into Kabul and all Korean diplomats and staff were evacuated to Qatar by Aug. 17. However, Korean diplomatic staff returned to Kabul Sunday to help support the operation, coordinating with allied countries like the United States to secure transportation routes.
A major hurdle for the evacuees were Taliban checkpoints on the way to Kabul airport. Some 40 of the Afghan evacuees lived outside the capital area. The Korean embassy, in cooperation with friendly countries, helped the evacuees reach their flights through six buses chartered at the last minute.
Choi stressed that the Afghan evacuees "are not refugees, but come to Korea as people of special merit."
He added, "Our government decided to welcome them to our country taking into consideration our moral responsibility amid a grave situation facing colleagues who have worked with us, our responsibility as a member of the international community and our global status as a leading nation upholding human rights, as well as the fact that other countries in a similar situation have also been transporting the Afghans."
The final number of evacuees was fewer than the 427 Afghans that had signed up to fly to Korea. A Foreign Ministry official confirmed Wednesday that 36 people ultimately chose to stay in Afghanistan or evacuate to another country.
This came as U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that the United States is on track to keep an Aug. 31 deadline for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
After the Afghans arrive in Korea, they will be tested for Covid-19 and isolated for two weeks at the National Human Resources Development Institute in Jincheon, North Chungcheong, following Covid-19 quarantine measures. They are expected to continue to be temporarily housed at the institute's Leadership Campus for at least six weeks, according to the Jincheon County Office.
They will arrive on short-term permits, which will later be extended to longer-term visas, said Seoul officials. The Foreign Ministry and Justice Ministry plan to provide further support and guidance should they wish to settle in Korea, or move to another country. Granting permanent residency could be one option for those who choose to remain in Korea.
Seoul officials said that background checks have already been conducted on the evacuees prior to their flights to Korea, and that their identities have been confirmed as they have worked with Koreans for years, some up to a decade.
Because they are entering Korea for "special merit," contributing to Korean government activities over the past 20 years, these Afghan evacuees' situation differs from refugees who first enter the country and then have to undergo a vigorous procedure to be legally granted asylum status.
Their situation can be compared to some 500 Yemenis who were granted by the Korean government in 2018 temporary humanitarian stay permits that allow them to remain on Jeju Island until the situation in their war-ravaged country stabilizes, said a Foreign Ministry official.
Afghans bound for Korea board a Korean Air Force transport plane at the Kabul airport Tuesday, local time. The Korean government flew three military aircraft to Pakistan earlier this week to airlift 390 Afghan evacuees, including 100 children. [FOREIGN MINISTRY]
President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday on the Afghan evacuation operation, "It is meaningful and natural for us to fulfill our moral responsibility to the Afghan people who have helped us," according to Park Kyung-mee, the presidential spokesperson.
Moon instructed the government and military to take care of the Afghans who worked with Koreans for their safe passage and to ensure that "there are no inconveniences after their arrival in Korea."
Separately, the Justice Ministry announced Wednesday that it will grant special humanitarian stay permits for Afghans already in Korea temporarily to continue to remain in the country.
As of August, there were 434 Afghans residing in Korea legally on short or long-term visas, according to the Justice Ministry.
The ministry has decided to allow foreign students who have completed their studies and short-term visitors who are usually allowed to stay up to 90 days to continue to reside and work in Korea with special permits if they want to stay.
Some 70 Afghans residing in Korea illegally will not be deported. They will be allowed to leave the country voluntarily after the situation in Afghanistan stabilizes.
The Justice Ministry said special stay permits will be granted after background checks of the individuals, taking into consideration public safety and terrorism concerns.
3. ‘Moral responsibility’: South Korea is airlifting hundreds of Afghans out of Kabul
Excerpts:
Choi cited the country’s “moral responsibility” to house the Afghans given the “serious situations” many of them are under. He added that the evacuees will be entering the country not as refugees, “but people who have done distinguished service to South Korea.”
Some South Korean lawmakers recently said the country ought to act amid the ongoing refugee crisis in Afghanistan.
“Afghanistan needs the help of neighboring countries for getting immediate humanitarian aid; however, unfortunately, Europe and many surrounding nations are against accepting refugees from Afghanistan,” Rep. Jang Hye-young of the progressive Justice Party said in a Facebook post Friday.
Jang added: “We need to actively seek a role we can play in a direction, which is solidarity and cooperation on a global level, instead of shifting all burdens of the acceptance of refugees onto countries surrounding Afghanistan.”
Over 3,900 South Korean troops served in Afghanistan, according to a Defense Ministry official who spoke to Stars and Stripes on the customary condition of anonymity Wednesday. One South Korean soldier died after a bomb attack in 2007.
Plans to temporarily relocate evacuees to U.S. bases in South Korea and Japan were scrapped due to logistical and geographical factors, according to a Reuters report on Tuesday.
‘Moral responsibility’: South Korea is airlifting hundreds of Afghans out of Kabul
Afghan families walk toward their plane during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2021. (Samuel Ruiz/U.S. Marine Corps)
CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea — Over 380 Afghans who supported South Korea in Afghanistan before the Taliban seized power are expected to arrive at an airport outside Seoul on Thursday, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The evacuees include locals who worked at the South Korean embassy in Kabul, hospitals, vocational training centers and provincial reconstruction teams.
They are being flown out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul aboard three South Korean military airplanes, Second Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Choi Jongmoon said during a Wednesday press conference.
Choi cited the country’s “moral responsibility” to house the Afghans given the “serious situations” many of them are under. He added that the evacuees will be entering the country not as refugees, “but people who have done distinguished service to South Korea.”
Some South Korean lawmakers recently said the country ought to act amid the ongoing refugee crisis in Afghanistan.
“Afghanistan needs the help of neighboring countries for getting immediate humanitarian aid; however, unfortunately, Europe and many surrounding nations are against accepting refugees from Afghanistan,” Rep. Jang Hye-young of the progressive Justice Party said in a Facebook post Friday.
Jang added: “We need to actively seek a role we can play in a direction, which is solidarity and cooperation on a global level, instead of shifting all burdens of the acceptance of refugees onto countries surrounding Afghanistan.”
Over 3,900 South Korean troops served in Afghanistan, according to a Defense Ministry official who spoke to Stars and Stripes on the customary condition of anonymity Wednesday. One South Korean soldier died after a bomb attack in 2007.
Plans to temporarily relocate evacuees to U.S. bases in South Korea and Japan were scrapped due to logistical and geographical factors, according to a Reuters report on Tuesday.
Over 58,700 people have been flown out of the airport in Kabul since Aug. 14, Army Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, the Joint Staff's deputy director for regional operations, said during a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday. Between Monday and Tuesday, 37 U.S. military aircraft transported a daily record of 12,700 people since the operation began, Taylor added.
Roughly 6,000 U.S. troops are deployed to the country to assist in the evacuation.
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen, during an interview with Sky News on Tuesday, described the date as a “red line” and warned of “consequences” if it was not met.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reiterated on Tuesday that there was “no way possible” for the U.S. to evacuate all necessary personnel by the deadline.
“Even from our own reporting, from those who are in charge, will tell you they can’t get the job done in that short amount of time,” McCarthy said during a press conference. “Until every American’s out, we should not be working on anything else.”
The Biden administration is “currently on pace” to meet the Aug. 31 deadline, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday. But, she added, that “depends on continued coordination with the Taliban, including continued access for evacuees to the airport.”
“I am determined to complete our mission,” Biden said in a speech Tuesday.
David Choi
Yoo Kyong Chang
4. US Special Envoy for North Korea Visits South Korea
Excerpt:
Some experts predicted that the South Korean government might be able to discuss North Korea policies with both Kim and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov, as he also arrived in Seoul on Saturday and is having meetings with his South Korean counterparts. Kim said he is going to meet with Morgulov during his visit to Seoul; however, Kim made clear that the United States is now focused on the North Korea-U.S. bilateral agreement and has no plan to resume any multilateral efforts at the moment.
US Special Envoy for North Korea Visits South Korea
With diplomacy stalled, Sung Kim and Noh Kyu-duk discuss how to renew dialogues with their counterparts in Pyongyang.
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Sung Kim, the U.S. special envoy for North Korea, visited South Korea on Saturday to discuss efforts for the denuclearization of North Korea with his South Korean counterparts.
It is Kim’s second visit to Seoul as a special envoy for North Korea, after having an in-person meeting with his South Korean counterparts in June to introduce the Biden administration’s North Korea policies and deliver messages to his counterparts in South Korea and North Korea.
On Monday morning, at the beginning of the meeting with his South Korean counterpart Noh Kyu-duk, Kim said that he is grateful to have an opportunity to engage with his counterparts in the South Korean government at this important time.
“I think my visit here is another indication of Washington’s determination to maintain the closest possible cooperation with the Republic of Korea government on all issues related to North Korea,” he said in the meeting.
South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises have been underway since August 16, despite North Korea’s warnings. From Seoul, Kim re-emphasized Washington’s stance on the allies’ joint exercises by saying that “the U.S. has no hostile intent toward North Korea and military exercises are purely defensive.”
Along with common security issues, Kim and Noh discussed the two countries’ possible humanitarian assistance to North Korea through international organizations such as United Nations, although the North has consistently refused to receive assistance from them since bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang stalled in 2019.
Kim, who is a veteran diplomat dealing with North Korea issues, once again conveyed messages to his North Korean counterparts via a one-on-one interview with Korea Broadcasting System (KBS) on Monday. In the interview, Kim said that he is willing to sit down with his North Korean counterparts “anywhere, anytime without preconditions” and urged Pyongyang to re-engage in dialogue to negotiate its denuclearization.
“I really do believe that there is an opportunity to make a serious progress with the DPRK. So I hope I would be able to sit down with my DPRK counterparts soon,” Kim said in an interview with KBS, referring to the formal name of North Korea.
Responding to Pyongyang’s threats over the joint military exercises, Kim said there is no reason for concern about the joint military exercises and emphasized that “the U.S. has no hostile intent towards the DPRK.”
Kim Yo Jong, sister of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, previously warned that North Korea would take actions to respond to the joint military exercises. Special Envoy Kim said the U.S., in partnership with South Korea and other countries, will respond appropriately if there is any provocation from North Korea. He also said that the U.S. commitment to protect the South’s security is “sacred” and there would be no change in the U.S. commitment to defending South Korea.
Washington has been clear that the joint military exercises are purely defensive, but North Korea has kept accusing both Washington and Seoul of preparing for another Korean War by conducting military exercises. Pyongyang has not been responding to renewed outreach from Washington and Seoul.
Some experts predicted that the South Korean government might be able to discuss North Korea policies with both Kim and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov, as he also arrived in Seoul on Saturday and is having meetings with his South Korean counterparts. Kim said he is going to meet with Morgulov during his visit to Seoul; however, Kim made clear that the United States is now focused on the North Korea-U.S. bilateral agreement and has no plan to resume any multilateral efforts at the moment.
Morgulov also had a meeting with Noh on Tuesday to discuss the permanent denuclearization and peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula. The two sides agreed on the importance of removing tensions in the Korean Peninsula and neighboring regions by renewing dialogue among related countries.
Cheong Seong-chang, a senior fellow at the Sejong Institute think tank in South Korea, told The Diplomat that the North Korea-U.S. negotiations during the Trump administration clearly demonstrated that direct talks between the two sides have clear limits, even if it is necessary for progress in the denuclearization of North Korea.
“The United States and North Korea have a very great difference … on measures that North Korea needs to take for denuclearization and corresponding measures of the international community,” Cheong said.
Cheong added that it is necessary for South Korea and China to be arbitrators between the U.S. and North Korea to reach an agreement at the moment. Also, he added that China’s cooperation is essential to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiating table as it is the biggest trading partner of the North.
After a policy review on North Korea, the Biden administration announced that it will pursue “a calibrated and practical” approach on North Korea issues. Experts have different views and predictions about its efficacy. As North Korea now demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops in South Korea and a halt to joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea, the United States would find it difficult to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table if it consistently urges the North to take productive steps toward denuclearization.
“The primary reasons dialogue has been stalled are that the Kim regime is not interested in denuclearization and has been paranoid about any contact that could be a vector for coronavirus into the country,” Leif-Eric Easley, associate professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, told The Diplomat.
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Easley added that “if North Korean domestic politics reduced reliance on narratives of external threat, relations could be transformed via staged denuclearization and economic cooperation.”
5. Korea takes Afghan refugees in show of US loyalty
No. This is not how the alliance works or should work. Our mature alliance does not require partners to show loyalty in instances like this. South Korea is doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do (Kant). It is a developed country with international responsibilities and it is acting as a responsible member of the international community. It is insulting to say that the ROK is doing this only because somehow it believes the US wants it to do this. Of course the US is pleased with this but it is pleased because the ROK is taking action on its own and is not being cajoled into doing this.
Korea takes Afghan refugees in show of US loyalty
South Korea is usually one of rich world's least refugee-friendly nations but intake aims to show its reliability as a US ally
SEOUL – South Korea, a nation with some of the most restrictive policies on refugees among first-world democracies, will accept some 391 refugees from Afghanistan.
According to a Blue House spokesman, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said accepting the refugees is a “moral responsibility” that is “helping the Afghans who helped our operations.”
However, there may be an unstated message: To show that South Korea – geopolitically surrounded by bigger, more powerful rivals in Northeast Asia – is in perfect lock-step with its United States ally.
The timing of that message is significant as a wavering and divided America abandons Afghanistan to its fate after a failed 20-year war finally lost to the Taliban.
South Korea deployed military transport aircraft to Islamabad on Monday, tasked with flying out refugees from Kabul. Some 391 Afghans, according to South Korea’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday, are expected to land in South Korea on Thursday.
The evacuees are medical professionals, vocational trainers, IT experts, interpreters and their family members who worked for South Korea’s embassy and humanitarian and relief missions in Afghanistan, Yonhap news agency reported.
The Afghans will be granted short-term visas, which can be extended to longer-term ones, officials quoted by Yonhap said. At this point is it unknown whether the Afghans will seek to settle down in Korea, or move on to third countries.
In a separate development this week, the US had reportedly considered deploying some of the thousands of refugees it is extracting from Afghanistan to the huge bases it maintains in Korea and Japan.
People evacuated from Afghanistan get airlifted by British military aircraft from Kabul Airport in Afghanistan on Aug 21, 2021. Photo: AFP / EyePress News
That option is no longer being considered by US planners on the basis of logistics and geography, according to Reuters. Even so, Reuters reported that South Korea had been willing to accept the US plan.
Meanwhile, the evacuation will please those members of South Korea’s polity and its lively civil society who have been agitating for a humanitarian stance.
“As the first Asian country that legislated the [UN] Refugee Act, [South Korea] has a role to play,” Representative Jang Hye-yeong of the progressive Justice Party stated, according to local media reports. “We have to work to pave the way for international solidarity by accepting at least families with pregnant women and children.”
Over 100 civic groups also issued a joint statement, calling for Seoul to protect Afghans who had worked for South Korean organizations.
However, despite these developments, South Korea – like neighbor Japan – is far from a paradise for asylum seekers and refugees.
Refugee resistance
Take North Korea defectors. They hail from the same culture, speak the same language, and enjoy a straightforward path to citizenship once within South Korean borders. But many find it intensely difficult to adapt to South Korea, and some say they face prejudice due to their North Korean accents.
Given customarily restrictive immigration and asylum policies toward all those who are not of Korean ethnicity, the sudden enthusiasm to accept alien refugees on Korean soil is unusual.
According to a 2019 report by the Middle East Institute, the approval rate for gaining refugee status in South Korea is 4%, “with the government applying rigorous vetting and selection criteria.”
The issue of refugees – and Middle Eastern conflict refugees – came starkly into the spotlight in 2018.
That year, some 550 Yemeni refugees unexpectedly arrived in Jeju, a resort island on the peninsula’s south coast.
The development sparked intense debate, including what the MEI called a “xenophobic response” that included protests and a petition by over 700,000 signatories against the Yemenis’ entry.
The Institute opined, “There is an inconsistency between South Korea’s accession to the [1994 UN] Refugee Convention, which signaled a willingness to accept refugees, and its capacity to accommodate refugees.”
South Korea’s prior stance toward refugees suggests that an unstated aim of the evacuation may be to demonstrate to President Joe Biden – who publicly lambasted Afghans for their refusal to fight for themselves – that South Korea is a willing, capable and staunch ally.
US President Joe Biden (R) and South Korean President Moon Jae-in participate in a press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on May 21, 2021. Photo: AFP / Brendan Smialowski
“South Korea stepping up to support evacuees from Afghanistan isn’t just about a middle-power country carrying its weight as a good global citizen,” Leif Eric-Eastley, an international relations professor at Seoul’s Ewha Womans’ University wrote in an email to foreign reporters. “It’s also a test of how the Washington-Seoul alliance extends beyond the Korean Peninsula.”
Following the fall of Kabul – a fall that shocked not just the world, but also the US president himself with its speed – Biden has made clear that his commitment to treaty allies such as Japan and South Korea remains firm.
On the one hand, the US is engaged in a struggle to remain ahead of fast-rising China, and South Korea and Japan are key geopolitical allies in that fight.
On the other, industrialized, prosperous and democratic South Korea, a shining beacon of 20th century US foreign policy success, is both far distant and a far cry from chaotic Afghanistan.
Even so, a below-the-surface paranoia bubbles within South Korea about Washington’s commitment.
In policy circles, this is evident in the inevitable shoulder-to-shoulder photo ops and cliched commitments to an “ironclad” alliance every time US and South Korean officials meet.
Among the chattering class, it is manifested in worried discussions about who Washington favors more: South Korea or national archrival and bete noire Japan.
By agreeing to take in Afghan refugees at a moment of US weakness, Seoul could be well-placed to steal a march in that contest.
Moon’s pro-US stripes
This national insecurity complex may explain why President Moon, despite being arguably the most leftist leader ever to take the national helm, has cleaved so closely to the US in his security, diplomatic and economic policies.
Ever since he took power in 2017, multiple pundits in the US and at home have endlessly anticipated crises in Seoul-Washington relations under Moon’s leadership, convinced that his emotive tilt toward North Korea and China will redirect his country away from the US.
Those analysts may have erred by over-emphasizing Moon’s political stance, while overlooking his prudent personality.
In actuality, the president, whose five-year term ends next spring, has confounded the naysayers by holding true to the alliance, even amid the stormy years of the Donald Trump presidency.
That fealty is clear in multiple spheres.
US and South Korean marines cross a bridge during mountain warfare drills in Pohang, about 370 kilometers (230 miles) southeast of Seoul. Photo: AFP / Kim Jae-hwan
Despite Moon’s personal chumminess with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, South Korea has not breached international sanctions on Kim’s isolated state. That has left Seoul’s highly prioritized cross-DMZ engagement policy, which looked hugely promising in 2018, almost entirely dead in the water.
Moon has gone to pains to maintain a 27,500-strong US troop presence on Korean soil, despite unprecedented and testy cost-sharing disputes that arose under Trump.
He has also –with some reluctance – allowed joint military drills to take place, in the full knowledge that these infuriate Pyongyang.
Moreover, since the alliance-focused Biden administration won the White House, Moon has significantly toned down his government’s anti-Japanese rhetoric and actions seen earlier in his term.
And now his government is apparently more willing than before to accept refugees from America’s far-flung wars.
6. Four reasons for an ‘end of armistice’ declaration
Mark Tokola is the only diplomat/scholar/practitioner who knows the history of negotiations and the little known negotiation that took place in Geneva in 1954.
Article IV
Recommendations to the Governments Concerned on Both Sides
60. In order to insure the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, the military Commanders of both sides hereby recommend to the governments of the countries concerned on both sides that, within three (3) months after the Armistice Agreement is signed and becomes effective, a political conference of a higher level of both sides be held by representatives appointed respectively to settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, etc.
https://2001-2009.state.gov/t/ac/rls/or/2004/31006.htm
Four reasons for an ‘end of armistice’ declaration
The most direct way to 'end the Korean War' is to resume talks that broke down in 1954
The idea of an “end of war” declaration for the Korean Peninsula has received a lot of attention lately. The notion is that it would jump-start diplomacy with North Korea. The fact that the Korean War never ended, according to proponents, is an impediment to engagement with Pyongyang. Isn’t it time to declare the war over?
There has, however, already been a definitive end-of-war declaration, subscribed to by all the belligerents. They signed an armistice agreement on July 27, 1953, putting an end to the Korean War.
Armistices traditionally are the way wars end. An armistice ended the Napoleonic Wars and an armistice ended World War I. An armistice is an agreement by military commanders to cease hostilities. Armistices are then followed by peace talks to deal with the root causes of the conflict.
The armistice ending the Napoleonic Wars was followed by the Congress of Vienna. The armistice ending World War I was followed by the Versailles Treaty. Why is the armistice situation on the Korean Peninsula unresolved?
It is not well known that an international diplomatic conference was indeed held to follow up on the Korean Armistice. A diplomatic conference took place in Geneva from April to June 1954, bringing together the United States, South Korea, the United Nations Command countries, the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea.
The conference generally succeeded in resolving the issues of withdrawal of foreign forces from Korea, elections to be held throughout the peninsula, and the creation of a constituent assembly to pave the way for a unified government.
The Geneva talks broke down over the issue of international supervision of the implementation of the agreement. The Western allies insisted on United Nations supervision, the USSR, China and North Korea on neutral nations’ supervision.
Because talks never resumed, the Korean Peninsula remains today in a state of armistice, not a state of war.
The question, therefore, is not whether there should be an end-of-war declaration, but whether there should be an end-of-armistice declaration.
The text of the Korean Armistice is not an obstacle to diplomacy. Article IV of the Armistice calls for political negotiations to achieve a peaceful settlement. It is worth noting that Article IV was included at the initiative of China and North Korea.
There are four differing arguments for declaring an end to the Korean Armistice.
Armistice violated
Such violations demonstrate that the Korean Peninsula is in a de facto state of war rather than a state of armistice.
After the 2010 sinking of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, among other incidents, it could be concluded that hostilities had resumed.
North Korea has often declared that it is no longer bound by the Armistice because of hostile acts by South Korea and the United States, but afterward invoked Armistice provisions, indicating that it still considers it in force.
Both sides have repeatedly broken the Armistice provisions prohibiting the introduction of new weapons on to the peninsula. The Armistice could be termed a failure and no longer in force.
Armistice has been a success
The parties to the Armistice could conclude that the status quo amounts to the peaceful settlement called for by the document. Discussions with North Korea over particular issues could continue, but there would be no need for an international agreement on a peace regime.
An impediment to this resolution of the Armistice is that the constitutions of both North and South Korea call for unification. Declaring that the Korea question has been resolved would seem to require a permanent acceptance of the division of the peninsula.
International involvement not required
Negotiations for a peaceful settlement on the Korean Peninsula no longer require the international involvement called for by the Armistice.
The obligation in the Armistice to conduct political negotiations applies to the signatories of the Armistice: the United States, China, North Korea, and the United Nations Command countries, including South Korea. A declaration could be made by the signatories saying that they now believe that negotiations for a peaceful settlement should be left to North Korea and South Korea alone.
North Korea has implicitly rejected this approach by arguing that its belligerence is a reaction to the United States’ “hostile policies.” The UN General Assembly has also stated that North Korea’s behavior is a matter of international, not only inter-Korean, concern.
Resume talks
The most direct way to end the Armistice would be to resume and conclude the negotiations called for by the Armistice. The Geneva talks could be resumed after a seven-decade lull, or the parties to the Armistice could reconfigure the negotiations any way they would choose.
Article IV is loosely worded. Any resumption of negotiations and any settlement agreed by the parties would end the Armistice.
The best, perhaps only, way to achieve a sustainable peace on the Koran Peninsula is through negotiations led by North and South Korea but with the involvement of countries whose support will be necessary to implement a negotiated outcome. A meaningful close to the Korean War, and the Armistice that ended it, should be through negotiations rather than by declarations unsupported by genuine, common understanding.
The Armistice provides an open door to negotiations. The only basis to repudiate the Armistice at this point would be if the status quo were deemed acceptable and a peaceful settlement unnecessary. That is a possible but pessimistic conclusion. Reaffirming and completing the Armistice is the way to achieve a sustainable peaceful settlement of the Korean question.
Mark Tokola is vice-president of the Korea Economic Institute of America in Washington, DC. He retired from the US Foreign Service in 2014 after a 38-year career. He served as director of the Iraq Transition Assistance Office in Baghdad from 2007-2008. Tokola received the US State Department’s Superior Honor Award for his work on implementing the Dayton Peace Accords while serving as political counselor in Sarajevo from 1997-1999. More by Mark Tokola
7. Seoul Ranked 25th Safest City in the World
I have always felt very safe in Seoul (except when I think about north Korean artillery, rockets, and missiles but I am sure that was not factored into the analysis here).
Seoul Ranked 25th Safest City in the World
August 25, 2021 11:41
Seoul has been rated the world's 25th safest city by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
In this year's Safe Cities Index, environmental security was newly added as a criterion, and Seoul promptly plummeted 16 notches from just two years ago. It earned 73.8 points out of 100.
The Danish capital Copenhagen was the safest city with 82.4 points, followed by Toronto, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.
The EIU has published the Safe Cities Index every two years since 2015.
/Yonhap
Seoul's ranking improved from 24th in 2015 to ninth in 2019 but floundered on the new evaluation criteria.
Cities are ranked in five categories -- digital, health, infrastructure, personal and environmental security. There were also some changes in the health and personal security categories due to the coronavirus pandemic.
8. Three Chinese sailors gunned down after landing on North Pyongan Province island
Initiative in the nKPA? Standing ROE allows shoot to kill on contact?
Three Chinese sailors gunned down after landing on North Pyongan Province island - Daily NK
The military unit issued the kill order before informing their superiors of the situation and receiving orders about what to do
In late July, North Korean authorities killed the crew of a Chinese fishing boat that illegally entered North Korean waters due to a typhoon. North Korea and China have begun investigations, with both sides worried that the incident could cause fissures in the relationship.
According to a Daily NK source in China on Monday, a Chinese fishing boat that left the port of Zhuanghe, Liaoning Province, headed toward the waters off North Pyongan Province around July 25 to catch crabs.
The boat in question was a motorboat that Chinese fishermen often use when fishing in waters off the west coast of North Korea to avoid detection by North Korean patrol boats.
However, around the time the boat arrived in North Korean waters, Typhoon In-Fa—the sixth typhoon of the year—was making its way northward along eastern China, and strong winds began blowing in the area of Liaoning Province and North and South Pyongan provinces. Even before the boat began fishing operations, it was driven by the wind to an island in Cholsan County, North Pyongan Province.
The waters near Cholsan County are home to several islands such as Ga-do and Daehwa-do, but Daily NK has yet to learn exactly which island the crew landed on.
Given that the crew of the boat landed on North Korean territory, North Korean patrol boats apparently failed to detect the boat out at sea and issue a warning for it to leave the area.
North Korean soldiers discovered the Chinese only after they had landed on the island. Not long after the discovery, they killed the three Chinese sailors who had gotten off the boat.
North Korean fishing boats on the water near Wonsan, Kangwon Province. / Image: Daily NK
The source said the military unit issued the kill order before informing their superiors of the situation and receiving orders about what to do.
In late August of last year, the Ministry of Social Security issued an order calling on troops to fire without warning upon anyone or anything entering a buffer zone extending one to two kilometers from North Korea’s “border blockade line.”
While North Korean leader Kim Jong Un expressed regret after North Korean forces killed a South Korean civil servant in the waters near Soyeonpyeongdo in September of last year, the formation commander and boat captain of the West Sea Fleet’s Eighth Flotilla—the unit directly involved in the incident—received military commendations.
North Korean soldiers involved in this latest incident involving the Chinese sailors may have killed the foreigners in the hope of receiving similar commendations.
Since North Korea’s Tongchang-ri missile launch site—the Sohae Satellite Launching Station—is located in Cholsan County, security in the area is especially tight against outside intruders.
Belatedly learning of the incident, Chinese authorities have launched their own investigation, though they are avoiding public mention of it.
The incident has reportedly led Chinese authorities to delay the issuing of permits to Chinese fishing boats to operate in West Sea waters until September.
They had initially planned to issue the permits from August.
Daily NK has yet to learn which agreements were made or what kind of opinions were exchanged between North Korean and China over the matter. However, the two sides may have made some sort of agreement or pledge to prevent a recurrence of similar incidents.
Moreover, with North Korea and China growing ever closer amid conflict between China and the US and the US and North Korea, Pyongyang and Beijing are likely to remain silent over the incident to preserve bilateral friendship.
Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
9. North Korea's foreign ministry defends Cuba's capture of American, boat seizure as 'legitimate measure'
I have not seen this in US news.
But of course the regime shows solidarity with its fellow totalitarian regime.
North Korea's foreign ministry defends Cuba's capture of American, boat seizure as 'legitimate measure'
In this 2018 November file photo released by North Korea's Rodong Sinmun, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel hug each other at Pyongyang International Airport. Yonhap
North Korea said Wednesday that Cuba has captured an American attempting to smuggle people from Havana to the United States, calling it a "legitimate measure."
The North's foreign ministry made the claim in an article on its website, saying the American approached the eastern coast of the Cuban capital on a speedboat on Aug. 7 in an attempt to take several Cubans to the U.S.
"The Cuban Coast Guard seized the speedboat and captured the American who had violated the territorial waters of Cuba," the article said.
"This is a legitimate measure taken by Cuba to defend its national sovereignty," it added.
According to the article, the Cuban Interior Ministry announced on Aug. 22 that it had seized the speedboat and captured the American.
The North's foreign ministry has recently released several statements on Cuba, accusing the U.S. of plotting schemes to inflame anti-government protests in the Caribbean nation.
North Korea has been seeking to maintain closer ties with its traditional friendly countries, including Cuba, amid an impasse in nuclear negotiations with Washington. (Yonhap)
10. North Korean students mobilized to help out with flood relief during vacation
Free labor. 5th grade and above? Surely a human rights issue of child labor.
The "positive" thing about natural disasters is that the regime can exert even greater control over large amounts of the population.
North Korean students mobilized to help out with flood relief during vacation - Daily NK
A source in North Hamgyong Province said the authorities were mobilizing “fifth-graders and above” for recovery efforts
North Korean students may have gone on vacation as scheduled, but Daily NK has learned that rather than resting, students are instead being mobilized to carry out flood relief or to lend a hand in agricultural villages.
According to multiple Daily NK sources in North Korea on Friday, North Korean elementary school students went on vacation at the beginning of the month, while middle, high school and university students started their vacation in the middle of the month.
However, authorities are enlisting vacationing students for labor in places in North and South Hamgyong provinces, which were battered by recent torrential rains.
A source in North Hamgyong Province said the authorities were mobilizing “fifth-graders and above” for recovery efforts. He said since schools are being paid according to the “results” of their labor, students “have to work morning to afternoon to carry out their daily work tasks.”
Once each school is tasked with recovery efforts in a particular area, the school splits up that area between each grade, class and academic department and assigns students daily tasks. They assign work each age group can handle; usually, this means students are filling up basins or buckets with mud, or moving rocks.
The source said in some rain stricken areas, students mobilized for recovery efforts even spent three straight days working from 5 AM to 1 AM the next day.
In areas that suffered no real damage, students are reportedly lending a hand in efforts to prevent damage in agricultural villages.
A source in Pyongyang said students are heading to nearby farms to erect stoneworks and levies, harden the ground and build waterways. “Last year, students were hardly mobilized during the summer vacation. They were busy with their incomplete school work,” he said. “This year, anyway, the school work is all finished, so it appears students will be mobilized throughout the vacation.”
To be excluded from work, students must submit a certificate or doctor’s note saying they need medical testing and pay a bit of money. Otherwise, the students need to pay a lot of money in the form of “voluntary” donations to the effort.
The source said such donations have no upper limit, “just minimum ones, at least KPW 100,000.” According to him, “Only those doing well can afford that kind of money. Those that can’t must pay it with the labor of their children, without complaint.”
Students at North Korea’s Pyongyang Elementary School take computer lessons. / Image: Ryukyung
This being the case, students are reportedly reducing their sleeping hours to do their vacation homework at night.
“Vacation homework is something mandatory for the students, so those mobilized for work during the week are doing their homework in the lamplight at night,” said another source in North Hamgyong Province. “So they can’t even think about helping out on their parents’ small fields. But some kids spend all night doing homework while they stand guard with their parents in lookout huts to help protect their corn fields.”
“If parents get caught lying that their kids are sick and not sending them to work because they are short on hands at home, those children will be criticized during their class vacation reviews,” said the source. “Ultimately, parents end up having to spend all night farming. So among parents, there’s grumbling about these labor mobilizations that repeat every year.”
Criticism is reportedly emerging that with the authorities failing to supply cement and other supplies needed to prevent damages, preventative efforts amount to patchwork, leading to continuous damage with levies breaking and fields flooding in monsoon rains, torrential downpours and floods.
In fact, parents are complaining that “they wouldn’t have to call out kids and other people” if the state would take proper preventative measures “from the very beginning” by providing “even a bit of cement,” and that it is a waste to keep doing the same thing every time there is a problem “even though levies will ultimately collapse when you build them using raw stones without cement.”
Meanwhile, according to a source in Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology have not sent students hailing from areas outside of the capital city back to their hometowns during the summer vacation because they have yet to complete their coursework.
Accordingly, the students remaining in Pyongyang are doing independent study in the mornings to complete their coursework and submitting work related to their independent study in the afternoons.
Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
11. Can food kindness win over North Korea?
I think not. The problem is the ROK, the US, and the international community care more about the welfare of the Korean people living in the north than does Kim Jong-un (despite the best attempts by the Propaganda and Agitation Department to show otherwise).
But if we do provide food aid we will do so because it is the right thing and not in the hopes that it will bring Kimong-un to the negotiating table (because it won't). Of course it is unlikely that Kim will accept it unless he believes he can exploit it for his own purposes.
Can food kindness win over North Korea?
The Biden administration threw its support behind a South Korea plan to offer aid to a food-short North Korea in hopes of renewing peace talks.
August 24, 2021
- By the Monitor's Editorial Board
Over his four years as South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in has looked for what he calls “snowballs,” or openings for soft diplomacy with North Korea. A snowball, he says, might be rolled into a snowman of peace. In recent weeks, Mr. Moon has spotted such an opening – a food crisis in North Korea – and has made plans to offer humanitarian aid. On Monday, he won a green light from the Biden administration to start this snowball rolling.
His hopes of using food aid to start a dialogue with North Korea on its nuclear program were bolstered in early August. Pyongyang agreed to reestablish a telephone hotline after a 13-month lapse. Also, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been unusually open and contrite about his failure to feed his 25 million people. Earlier this year, he apologized for what he called the “worst situation ever” in agriculture.
While heavy rains, drought, international sanctions, and the pandemic have contributed to the North’s food shortage, Mr. Kim’s apology clearly points to mismanagement of his government-run and closed economy. His regime has had to dip into the military’s rice reserves to keep people from starvation. According to a United Nations forecast in late July, the food situation will deteriorate through November. Some Korea watchers expect an aid deal within a year.
Food aid is allowed under the U.N. sanctions regime imposed on North Korea for violations in its testing of missiles and nuclear weapons. For Mr. Moon, a former human rights lawyer whose parents came from North Korea, the aid would be a small step in rebuilding trust and in signaling a message of unity between the divided Korean people. His act of kindness might have that sort of snowball effect.
12. The Cycle Begins Anew In North Korea – OpEd
A former north Korean negotiator lamented to me that everything that can be tried with north Korea has been tried. We continue to repackage all the various actions, offers, and positions.
The Cycle Begins Anew In North Korea – OpEd
By Felix Imonti
Does the appearance of change in North Korea mean anything?
Kim Jong-Un told the delegates of the Workers Party in January that the economic emphasis would shift from the military, which consumes half of the national budget, to the civilian sector. He also announced that the number of troops would be reduced and the terms of service would be cut from thirteen years to eight for men, and from eight to five for women. Large numbers of men have been discharged and sent to work in coal mines or on commune farms. With little hope for anything better, some are joining roaming bands of bandits.
The shrunken ranks means that the military can release to the civilian population stores of rice and corn meal. With an arsenal of nuclear weapons, Kim Jong-Un has little concern that South Korea or the United States will use a weakened military as an opportunity for an invasion, as his father had feared during the famine of 1994.
Prior to the January announcement that the ranks of the military would be thinned, Kim Jong-Un displayed new advanced missiles in November. On display was the transformation of the DPRK military into a technically advanced force that no longer relies on ranks of poorly trained and badly equipped malnourished troops. What also can be interpreted from the new high-tech military is a shift in strategy from a war of attrition to an emphasis on a first-strike of maximum destruction.
Economic stresses were confronted at a cabinet meeting in February. Kim Jong-Un admonished members for failing to devise a workable program to rejuvenate the economy. Kim Tu Il, the director of the Central Committee’s Department of Economic Affairs, was charged with the failure and dismissed after only one month in the position. Kim Jong-Un ordered a shift to a centrally directed economy that will consolidate power in his hands. At a time when he is under assault by famine, U.S. sanctions, and the COVID-19 virus, he has opted for tighter control. The surprise invasion by the virus appears to have thrown him into a panic that has transformed the Hermit Kingdom into the Isolated Kingdom, with sealed borders and severe shortages of everything.
Younger sister Kim Yo-Jong took the stage in April by threatening the South. While she was insulting and threatening, a private correspondence between the heads of the two Koreas was being conducted secretly. Following the tradition of hot-and-cold diplomacy, the Workers’ Party abandoned in June the policy of applying subversion to overthrowing South Korea.
Pyongyang surprised everyone on July 27 by reopening four telephone links between the North and the South. Cutting the links in June of 2020 was to punish the South for allowing propaganda bearing balloons to be launched over its territory. Regardless, critical communications link had been maintained. As usual, Kim Jong-Un’s shift was only a gesture with little substance.
As members of the Moon Administration celebrated the warming relations, the DPRK military added a chill to the diplomacy by implying that it is preparing to implement urban guerrilla warfare in the South.
Referring to the reopening of the telephone links, Unification Minister Lee In-young said in a Facebook post: “This is only the beginning. I will work harder for the Kaesong Industrial Complex, the reunion of separated families and others.” Kaesong is a North-South industrial complex that U.S. sanctions are blocking the Moon Administration from reopening.
Some in the Moon Jae-In administration who favor closer ties with the North will argue that desperation makes Kim Jong-Un more flexible. There, however, has never been a time when the plight of his population has ever affected Kim’s policies.
Moon Jae-In is the more desperate of the two, and is the more willing to shift his course. After years of being a civil rights lawyer, he imposed freedom of speech restrictions on South Koreans by punishing anyone sending balloons over the North.
Moon Jae-In’s political career ends in March 2022, and he has little to show for it. The new Biden Administration places little importance upon the Korean peninsula and is not likely by March 2022 to modify any of the sanctions. President Moon could take the drastic step of shipping tons of desperately needed rice or thousands of vaccine shots to the North for humanitarian purposes. If the U.S. retaliates, President Moon could claim the high moral ground and point out from Afghan images how unreliable the American ally is. Now standing at the end of an unimpressive career, President Moon has nothing more to lose.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com
13. Moon names new secretary for New Southern and Northern policies
The New Southern and Northern Policies are important compliments to the US Free and Open Indo Pacific policy.
Moon names new secretary for New Southern and Northern policies
From left are new presidential secretary for civil participation Kang Kwun-chan, presidential secretary for New Southern and Northern policies Kim Jeong-hoi and presidential secretary for land and transport Kim Yi-tak. Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae
By Nam Hyun-woo
Kim Jeong-hoi, deputy minister for trade negotiations at the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, was appointed as presidential secretary for New Southern and Northern policies, which are aimed at bolstering economic ties with countries south and north to Korea.
Presidential spokesperson Park Kyung-mee said Tuesday that President Moon Jae-in named Kim, 50, as his new secretary in charge of the policies. The post has been vacant since Kim's predecessor, Yeo Han-koo, was appointed as trade minister earlier this month.
Kim is a career bureaucrat, taking key posts related to Korea's U.S.-bound trade at the trade ministry. He also served at the ministry's departments on vehicle-technology convergence and energy resources, before becoming the deputy minister for trade negotiation last December.
Kim graduated from Seoul National University's Department of Economics and earned his master's degree at Boston University.
The New Southern and Northern policies are Moon's initiative to enhance economic ties with southern countries including ASEAN member nations and India, and northern countries including Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
With the southern countries, the President seeks to improve their ties with Korea to a level matching the four powerhouses surrounding Korea ― the U.S., China, Japan and Russia ― so they can build a future-oriented partnership toward prosperity. With northern countries, Moon seeks to capitalize on their economic growth potential and connectivity to Europe.
Kim's appointment is interpreted as President Moon's bid to pursue stability among his aides by hiring officials who have been serving in related government organizations. Along with Kim, Moon appointed Kang Kwun-chan as secretary of civil participation and Kim Yi-tak as secretary of land and transport. The former is from the office of presidential planning secretary and the latter is from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.
"The new secretaries have been building their experience and expertise in Cheong Wa Dae and respective ministries, and they have profound understanding of the Moon Jae-in administration's policy philosophy," the spokesperson said in a written briefing. "As they have been addressing key pending issues so far, they are expected to play their roles with responsibility."
Kang is a Korea University graduate and also earned his Ph.D. in political diplomacy from the graduate school there. Land and transport secretary Kim is a Seoul National University graduate.
14. Fat-Shaming, North Korea Style
The fat elite. I guess Kim has been leading by example. (note sarcasm)
Fat-Shaming, North Korea Style
While many people in North Korea are currently suffering from hunger, as a result of coronavirus-related shortages, obesity is a problem that is growing among North Korea’s elite class.
It’s been in the news in recent months that Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, appears to have lost a great deal of weight. It’s not clear exactly what Kim did to lose the weight, although those who watch North Korea have been following the situation for clues as to what it means for Kim’s position.
Observers believe that if Kim has lost weight due to living a healthier lifestyle, then that’s considered a good thing for his strength, but if he’s battling some sort of illness that has caused the weight loss, then the opposite is true.
Now, there’s something else in the North Korea media talking about weight issues, although nothing having to do with Kim Jong-un.
NK News reported this week that North Korean state media recently broadcast a cartoon “criticizing friend for being overweight.” The cartoon shows the girl in “an apparent food coma” as a result of apparent overeating.
The story added that while many people in North Korea are currently suffering from hunger, as a result of coronavirus-related shortages, obesity is a problem that is growing among North Korea’s elite class.
While the North Korean regime usually puts a positive spin on ongoings in that country, they have been very open about recnt starvation. Comparisons have been made to both North Korea’s 1994 famine, and to the earlier “Arduous March.” However, the nation has mostly rejected the help of international agencies, including when it comes to vaccines.
Human Rights Watch Researcher Lina Yoon has declared that North Korea is “in crisis.”
“There is barely any food going into the country from China for almost two months now,” a missionary told Yoon. “There are so many more beggars, some people died from hunger in the border area and there’s no soap, toothpaste, or batteries.”
“It has become increasingly difficult to learn the truth about what is happening to ordinary people, but there is little doubt that the situation is dire,” Yoon said.
“Official trade data provides a glimpse of the grim economic plight of the North Korean people,” according to Yoon. “Trade with China in 2020 decreased by almost 81 percent, which came after already enormous drops in 2018, after the United Nations anti-weapons proliferation sanctions were expanded. The government dramatically reduced imports of staple foods and other necessities from China in August and stopped almost all imports, including all food and medicine, in October, claiming that COVID-19 can spread through migratory birds and animals, snow, and ‘yellow dust’ blowing into the country from China. These shocks came alongside severe floods that hit the country between June and September, destroying crops, roads, and bridges—further undermining agricultural production.”
Stephen Silver, a technology writer for the National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
15. California celebrates ‘Kimchi Day,’ declaring S. Korea as origin
Small victory in the soft power battlespace. Hardly a surprise that this would happen in the US and California.
California celebrates ‘Kimchi Day,’ declaring S. Korea as origin
Posted August. 25, 2021 07:34,
Updated August. 25, 2021 07:34
California celebrates ‘Kimchi Day,’ declaring S. Korea as origin. August. 25, 2021 07:34. yeah@donga.com.
The California State Assembly unanimously passed a resolution to designate “Kimchi Day” on Tuesday, becoming the first U.S. state to specify South Korea as the country of origin of Kimchi. Accordingly, the state is expected to open various promotional events regarding kimchi-making, etc. on Nov. 22 every year. Also, the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corp. will hold “Kimchi Festival” in Los Angeles where visitors make kimchi and engage in other activities to promote the traditional South Korean food.
The resolution specifies that South Korea is the origin of kimchi, which dates back to the early days of the epoch of the three Kingdoms, adding that kimjang or making and sharing kimchi was designated in 2013 as an item of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It also says that a growing popularity of kimchi in the United Sates has a relevance to a high level of public interest in K-pop, K-beauty and other South Korean cultural aspects.
Californian Assemblyman Steven Choi, who led the resolution on “Kimchi Day,” said that he proposed the bill to correct China’s false argument that kimchi is a traditional Chinese food, explaining that the state of California intends to side with the South Korean government as a U.S. state with the largest number of Korean American citizens.
Last year, the South Korean government designated Nov. 22 as “Kimchi Day,” which means about 11 major ingredients of kimchi such radishes, cabbages, salt and salted fish have 22 health benefits of lowering risks of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and others.
16. Biden should end North Korea travel ban, humanitarian and advocacy groups say
People to people engagement is an important component of an information and influence strategy. Unfortunately north Korea is a dangerous place and it has proven over and over again it will kidnap and torture Americans and other foreign nationals. And of course "tourism" supports the regime's royal court economy directly.
There are also ways to conduct people to people engagement with Koreans from the north outside the country. I had a unique engagement in Kunming China at the airport with a delegation from north Korea as they were waiting for the flight to Burma. They were quite surprised to be engaged by an American using my broken Korean. The low level diplomats started to engage until the senior member (minder!) made them break contact with a harsh command to stay away from the American bastard. Over the years I also ran into delegations at the Hong Kong airport and it was always interesting to see the different responses I received.
But these American "peace activists," such as Christine Ahn, bear watching as they are carrying the water for north Korea. Unfortunately, they have an outsized influence in the US Congress. The Women Across DMZ movement has never acknowledged the horrendous human rights abuses and crimes against humanity being committed in the north. A litmus test for any Congressperson and their staff should be to ask the question of these groups: "Do you acknowledge and unequivocally condemn the human rights atrocities being committed against the Korean people living in the north?" If they do not do so, then they should not be engaged.
Biden should end North Korea travel ban, humanitarian and advocacy groups say
TOKYO — Until a few years ago, Americans traveled to North Korea for a host of reasons. Korean Americans reunited with loved ones from whom they were separated during the Korean War. Medical groups treated patients and trained doctors. Cultural exchange programs sought to introduce sports and entertainment, such as surfing and the New York Philharmonic.
But those trips ended in 2017, when the Trump administration imposed a travel ban after the death of Otto Warmbier, an American student who traveled to the totalitarian country and was arrested and detained on charges of stealing a propaganda poster. He died days after being flown home in a coma.
Now, humanitarian groups and other advocates are urging the Biden administration to end the travel ban, which is set to expire on Sept. 1 after being renewed every year since it took effect.
Last week, peace activists, humanitarian and nongovernment organizations, and Korean American groups representing separated families met with administration officials to make their case. They argued that ending the ban would allow families to reunite with their aging loved ones, bring medical and humanitarian aid to those who need it the most, and help ordinary North Koreans and Americans to learn more about one another beyond what’s reported in the news.
They noted that during the presidential campaign, candidate Joe Biden promised to “reunite Korean Americans separated from loved ones in North Korea for decades” — and that ending the ban would be an important step. They added that thousands of Korean American families have safely traveled to North Korea over the years to reunite with their families.
“It prevents separated families from finding out information about each other and going to visit relatives in North Korea,” said Ji-Yeon Yuh, Northwestern University professor and co-founder of the advocacy group Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, who attended the meeting. “The death of Otto Warmbier is a tragedy, but it’s also a tragic exception.”
For now, these groups can’t enter even if the ban is revoked. North Korea’s border has been sealed to trade and visitors since the pandemic took hold, and most diplomats and international aid groups have left the country because of covid restrictions.
But ending the ban would allow humanitarian and development workers to prepare to return as soon as North Korea reopens and resume delivering aid that had been cut off during the pandemic, said Keith Luse, executive director of Washington-based think tank National Committee on North Korea.
“As the border reopens, those workers providing assistance must be able to move expeditiously. The border closure is depriving the neediest of North Korea’s citizens, including tuberculosis patients, [of] essential medication and care,” Luse said. “When the counting is done, it may be determined that more of North Korea's citizens perished from consequences of the quarantine than from covid-19.”
The State Department declined to say whether the secretary of state plans on extending or revoking the ban when it expires on Sept. 1.
A spokeswoman said in a statement that the “safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas is one of our highest priorities” and that the ban was extended last September “due to continuing concerns over the serious risk of arrest and long-term detention in North Korea.”
The State Department’s ban allows exemptions for “extremely limited purposes in the U.S. national interest” through a special validation process. Several nongovernmental organizations said that this process has created logistical burdens because an exemption must be obtained for each trip, with no scope for multiple entries.
In a letter this month to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, advocates said the detention of U.S. citizens is far more common in other countries where travel is legal.
“The great weight of historical data suggests that careful attention to one’s activity while in North Korea, and those traveling there with permission of the North Korean government or a recognized sponsor, are unlikely to experience any impact on their safety,” the letter reads.
During a visit to South Korea this week, President Biden’s special envoy for North Korea, Sung Kim, said he is ready to meet with his North Korean counterparts after stalled nuclear talks. He and South Korean officials said they discussed ways to facilitate diplomacy, including through humanitarian work.
Christine Ahn, the founder of peace activism group Women Cross DMZ, said ending the travel ban would provide a natural way for U.S. officials to engage with North Korea.
“You can’t have a pragmatic and calibrated approach and yet maintain an anachronistic Trump-era policy,” Ahn said. “Talk is cheap, and this is an easy lift for the Biden administration. [The ban] hampers people-to-people engagement, family reunions and . . . improving relations with North Korea.”
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
